65 Million Years Off
The episode begins with a flashback to 1987. Gus, wearing an actual-size model of a Tyrannosaurus Rex head, is accusing Shawn of slapping his little T-Rex model together in five minutes the night before the project was due, while Gus worked on his for months. Shawn tells Gus he actually spent a "whole hour" on his project. It's a small T-Rex toy, duct-taped to a remote control car, which Shawn drives right up to the teacher. She picks it up and gives Shawn the thumbs-up, and once again, Gus's hard work is overshadowed by Shawn's last-minute slapdash efforts. Gus tells Shawn he hates him. In the present day, Lassiter is having a stare-down with a hardened, tattooed criminal in an interrogation room. He speaks one word: "Lompoc," and the detainee breaks down and confesses on the spot. Outside the room, the whole precinct erupts into cheers. Lassiter has solved eight cases in a row. As the party breaks up, we see Shawn leaning against the wall. He asks Juliet why no one has called him for help in the past month. Juliet tells him they just haven't needed him because Lassiter has been on fire lately. Lassiter himself walks up and gloats over Shawn. Shawn looks mopey, so Lassiter jokingly invites him along on their next case -- a body washed up at the marina -- saying, "Oh come on. We'll show you how the real cops do it!" Shawn is feeling so down, he can't even muster a decent (or timely) comeback. He does go to the marina, however, and pick-pockets Lassiter's notes. He's reading about the damage to the corpse (blunt force trauma, strange puncture wounds, possible animal bites with a 34" bite radius, etc.) when Gus walks up. Gus is indignant that Shawn called him away from the office when they don't even have a case yet, but Shawn tells him to be patient; they will get a case within five minutes. Lassiter points out to the chief that there's nothing in those waters that has a bite that big. He thinks out loud, theorizing about whale attacks and boating accidents. Shawn has a "psychic episode," grabs Lassiter's note pad, and frantically draws a picture of the culprit. When he's finished, he shows it to the chief, Lassiter, Juliet, and Gus, who shake their heads and walk away. The picture he drew is of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Alone with the body, he says, "this is no boating accident!" At the Psych office, Gus is really upset that Shawn isn't taking the case seriously. Shawn tells Gus it really could have been a Tyrannosaurus, and he shows Gus a picture he has of himself dangling from the jaws of a T-Rex skeleton at a museum. In fact, Shawn seems to be talking himself into his own joke theory. He needs to borrow his dad's truck. At the coroner's office, the medical examiner tells the chief, Lassiter, and Juliet that the victim did not drown. First came the blunt force trauma, severe enough to knock him unconscious. He fell onto something hard and dislocated a rib and got bruises consistent with a 7'-8' fall, died, and then ended up in the water. Lassiter thinks they should check with the offshore oil rigs to see if they're missing anyone. As Lassiter goes on in a self-satisfied way about how smart his theory is, Juliet notices a dinosaur head sneaking past the door. Shawn then enters, wearing Gus's old T-Rex head. He wants to check the body and compare the bite radius, but the chief tells him she isn't going to stand for this type of antic. Shawn leaves. Shawn's returning the truck to Henry (his dad), and finds Gus, Henry, and a stranger in the kitchen. The stranger is a police shrink, and this is apparently an intervention, at the request of the police chief. The shrink tries to get Shawn to talk about his delusions of magical powers, but Shawn notices some clues about the shrink and does his psychic routine on him. He's impressed. Then the chief, Lassiter, and Juliet burst in, saying they caught a break in the case. The victim's name is Christopher Franzen, and he was a paleontologist! After commercials, Gus and Shawn walk down the street discussing the case. Gus now embraces Shawn's joke dinosaur theory a little too much, rambling on about hidden islands in the Pacific with actual dinosaurs living on them. Shawn doesn't really have any better ideas, though. He's actually taken aback that his wacky joke theory hit so close to the mark. They'll have to sift through the archaeology department's entire collection of artifacts, which Shawn expects will take probably nearly 24 hours. At the archaeology department, Gus and Shawn are bending over a table containing an odd assortment of dinosaur bits: a few random teeth, part of a jaw bone. It's a pretty pathetic collection, and Shawn says so to Ethan, the guy who's helping them at the university's archaeology department. Ethan agrees, and tells them of a rumor that the whole program is going under. Ethan goes on to tell them how flaky and unreliable professor Franzen always was, always coming in late, disheveled, and very tired. Ethan walks off in a huff. Shawn and Gus have hit a dead end, but Shawn points out that at least they seem to be ahead of the police on this one. Just then they see Lassiter coming in, so they have to skedaddle out the back way. Shawn and Gus next visit Franzen's house, and the police are already there. Shawn spies a large shed with a newly installed electronic combination lock in the back yard (and the police haven't seemed to notice it yet), so they sneak back to it. To Shawn's amazement, Gus cracks the lock's code on his first try. Inside, they find a huge collection of fossils and archaeology equipment, and a document with Xes and Os on it. Shawn wonders if Franzen was the worst tic-tac-toe player in history. Before they even have a chance to celebrate their discovery, Gus sees Lassiter pull up. They leave the shed, but instead of sneaking away, they act like they got there just after Juliet and Lassiter, who is pretty pleased with himself that he seems to be always a step ahead of the psychic. However, Lassiter doesn't know how to open the fancy lock on the shed. Shawn tells them that he can psychically divine the combination, but they have to step away. Gus doesn't want to help Shawn and let him take the credit, but Shawn bribes him with his Tony Gwynn rookie. Gus feeds Shawn the combination: 25-3-2-9. The lock opens, and even Lassiter is impressed. Inside the shed, Lassiter quickly notices that some tools are missing. He thinks they're probably in the bed of the victim's truck, which is neither at his house or at the university. He says if they find the truck, they'll probably find the murder weapon. Shawn and Gus exchange a confused look (how did Lassiter get so sharp all of a sudden?), and Lassiter and Juliet take off. After they're gone, however, Shawn notices a bunch of boxes from a fruit stand that's over 50 miles away. They take off to pay the fruit stand guy a visit. The fruit guy tells Shawn and Gus that Franzen was his best customer. He tells them Franzen always stopped in right before closing, then went up the hill. A couple times the fruit guy saw Franzen coming back down the hill in the early morning, as if he'd been out there all night. Shawn and Gus buy a peach pie and drive up the hill, onto private property marked "Deacon Walker Farms -- no trespassing." They come to a locked gate, but Shawn notices that someone has been repeatedly lifting the gate off its hinges and sneaking in, so they do the same. They walk through a field and come upon a series of large holes in the ground. Before they investigate further, though, shots ring out, and they run away (Gus screaming like a girl). They drive off in a hurry. Back at the police station, the chief is pressing Shawn to give up any leads he's psychically uncovered. Shawn clucks like a chicken, and then tells the chief he's getting something about a farm. Lassiter and Juliet burst in to the office with the news that they found Franzen's truck down at the marina. They also found fingerprints and letters from Ethan Robinson (the disgruntled student Shawn and Gus met earlier). The letters are demands that Franzen stop ruining his life. They've sent a car over to pick up Ethan. Shawn tries to intervene, bringing up the farm thing again. Lassiter tells him that they already know about Walker Farms. Franzen had repeatedly tried to buy some land but Walker wouldn't sell it. Walker was cooperative with the investigation and is not a suspect. The chief congratulates Lassiter on being very thorough. Shawn and Gus burst into Henry's house and Shawn tells him they need to borrow some digging tools. Henry doesn't want Shawn going. Shawn accuses him of not being supportive, so Henry confesses he's worried about Shawn getting shot at. Shawn tells him he'll be fine, and he and Gus take off. At the field, Shawn has a brain flash and realizes that the tic-tac-toe document they found at the shed was actually a map. The Xes were misses, and O marks the spot. So he closes his eyes, conjures up a mental image of the map, and determines where they should dig. Time passes, and the hole is getting pretty deep. They finally find something in the dirt. Gus, brushing it off, notes that it is a fossil that has already been processed. He doesn't know why someone would do the cleaning and processing here when it should be done in the lab. Shawn points out that maybe it was too big to move. He gets his dad's leaf-blower and uncovers the fossil of a T-Rex head! Back at Psych HQ, Shawn and Gus are lying on the floor, exhausted. They had filled the hole back up so that Shawn could "psychically" reveal its location when he unmasks the true killer. They're confused about why the farmer wouldn't let Franzen dig there or lease him the land or something. Shawn wants to go ask the farmer himself. They decide they'll need a cover story. Shawn wants to do "Of Mice and Men" -- he gets to be Lennie. Gus thinks that they should say they're from some paleontology society. Back at the fruit stand, they learn that Deacon Walker Farms used to supply fruit to the fruit guy, but they don't grow nearly as much as they used to, and fruit guy grows his own fruit on his own parcel of land now. They thank him and drive off to Deacon Walker Farms. A cranky old guy answers the door and tells them he's Sullivan Walker. Roger Deacon used to be his partner. Gus tells him they're from the National Paleontological Society. Walker tells them he's not interested and slams the door in their faces. They knock again and tell him they want to make a generous offer on a very small portion of his land. He slams the door again. They knock one more time, and Shawn does his Lennie impression, which is equally ineffective. As they're leaving the property, they find the farmer has been digging, too -- with a bulldozer, and nowhere near where Franzen was digging. Just then Henry calls Shawn on his cell. He tells him he just remembered why the name of the farm sounded familiar to him -- years ago a girl reported that her boyfriend, Roger Deacon, went missing. He was never found. Shawn tells Henry he thinks he might know where Deacon is -- that he's looking at him right now -- and hangs up the phone. At the precinct, Lassiter tells the chief that his case against Ethan the archaeology grad student isn't so solid. Juliet interrupts them saying Shawn is on the line, and wants them to meet him at Deacon Walker Farms. She tells them Shawn's claimed he can solve the case, plus solve an old unsolved murder, and unearth a dinosaur. At the farm, Walker shows Juliet and Lassiter around, acting all cooperative. They don't even know what else to ask him, but just then Shawn and Gus walk up. Shawn tells them all that Franzen had found clues that indicated to him there might be a big fossil find on Walker's property, but Walker wouldn't -- couldn't -- let him dig around. However, Franzen was desperate because his department was on the verge of going under, so he dug anyway, under cover of night. Then Walker found out what Franzen had discovered, and he knew that once word got out, a whole flock of archaeologists would descend on his property, which he really couldn't have. Just then Henry runs up. He tells Shawn he was worried, but then realizes he's showing emotion, so tacks on that he was worried about his tools. Then Henry has a brain flash and blurts out "Deacon is buried on the property!" Shawn is upset that Henry blew his big reveal. He reluctantly continues that Walker killed Deacon, his old partner, 20 years ago, but he can't remember where he put the body. Shawn goes on saying that Walker killed Franzen when he found him standing over his skull discovery. He smacked him over the head with a shovel and knocked him right into the jaws of the Tyrannosaurus skull. Then he had to dump him somewhere where there would be no forensics -- the ocean. Juliet tells Lassiter she has a bad feeling about his case-closing streak. He agrees, with a sour look on his face, and slap the cuffs on Farmer Walker. As the cops lead Walker off, Shawn and Gus fight over the shovel and who gets to "discover" the dinosaur and what they're going to name him. Shawn likes Zippy…or maybe Chompy. At the police station, Lassiter laments the end of his streak, and the fact that he is doomed because he can never bring himself to suspect an extinct or imaginary creature of murder. Juliet tries to comfort him, asking if he needs a hug. He storms off, but then comes back and takes the hug. Then storms off again. Shawn walks in to Henry's house and finds the intervention team is assembled there once more. Henry starts in on Shawn's irresponsibility, but the shrink interrupts saying that actually the intervention is for Henry. He wants to talk about Henry's obsessive need for control. Henry throws them out. Category:Psych Episodes Category:Season Two